Women’s Baseball and Suffrage, 1915
Courtesy, New Jersey Historical Society
Amelia Berndt Moorfield Collection

Athletics for girls and women became commonplace by the late 19^th century. Between 1890 and 1920, a small women’s league, the Bloomer League, played baseball in various parts of the United States. Named for Amelia Bloomer, a 19^th century advocate of healthier dress fashions for women, the league provided an opportunity for some women to play professional ball. Women’s baseball was still enough of a novelty and crowd pleaser in 1915 that New Jersey suffragists used baseball games, such as the one pictured above, to attract attention to the up-coming state referendum on woman suffrage.